Death and Drama in Renaissance England: Shades of Memory

by William E. Engel

Overview

Drawing on a range of works from the English Renaissance, Death and Drama in Renaissance England offers a novel way to understand, in their original contexts, key aspects of Renaissance mental life and letters. Focusing on the classical Memory Arts, William Engel explores issues of death and decline in exemplary dramas, dictionaries, and histories of the period, and demonstrates the ways in which emblems and memory images were used to communicate special meanings.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199257621
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	01/28/2003
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 5.60(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

William E. Engel is an independent scholar and freelance tutor; author of Education & Anarchy (University Press of America, 2001) and Mapping Mortality: The Persistence of Memory and Melancholy in Early Modern England (University of Massachusetts Press, 1995). He has been Research Fellow at the Huntington Library, Newberry Library, and Folger Shakespeare Library; Visiting Scholar at Harvard University; and is currently Visiting Professor at The University of the South.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations
Note on conventions used in the text
Preface
Introduction: 'Take Away But One Letter': The Spirit of Decline
I. Staging kinetic emblems of fatal destiny
1. 'Commonplaces of memory': visual regimes and charmed spaces
2. 'But yet each circumstance I taste not fully': spectacles of ruin
II. The true work of translation
3. 'Touching my translation': linguistic decorum and memory's domain
III. The marrow and moral of history
4. 'O eloquent, iust, and mighty Death!': ending The History of the World
5. 'More easie to the readers memory': using The History of the World
Conclusion: 'Simulars of the dead': a final declension
Appendix: The end of Ralegh's History of the World
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Engel offers intriguing examples...marks a fresh contribution to this scholarship."—Shakespeare Studies Annual

"Engel provides a useful methodology for examining other contemporary works...provocative readings..."—Libraries & Culture

"An intriguingly labyrinthine and learned account of the function of emblems, including emblematic aspects of drama."—Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

"Engel is the first post-Yates scholar to offer a compelling account of the importance of the memory arts in the English Renaissance.... Engel attends with sensitivity and acumen to the complex ways that mnemonic art encodes and enacts its meanings, accomplishing his goal of 'help[ing] scholars of early modern England become better, more mnemonically attuned, interpreters.'... Death and Drama will certainly reinvigorate early modern memory studies, and Engel remains the Renaissance memory arts' most eloquent spokesperson."—Sixteenth Century Journal

"[An] important study of images of death in seventeenth-century English drama, rhetoric, and historiography."—Renaissance Quarterly

"This is dramatic criticism and cultural history of a very high order, learned but not pedantic, an essential book for a fuller understanding of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean tragedy, whether derived from history or from domestic life."—Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance

"A wide-ranging account of the emblematic and mnemonic functions of images of mortality, with implications which extend far beyond the individual plays.... Future work on all such emblematic forms in Elizabethan and Jacobean culture will need to take account of this latest study."—Society for Emblem Studies Newsletter

"Like an emblem book, Death and Drama is capacious in its subject matter; episodic in its rhetorical construction; and often digressive in its argument (a quality which Engel appreciates in Ralegh). All of which adds up to a demanding, unorthodox, and ultimately moving study that remains very difficult to categorize within current disciplinary boundaries."—Clio: Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History

"Certainly loss is what memory both defends us against and promises to overcome. It is Engel's exploration of the ways in which early modern culture sought to come to terms with this recognition that represents Death and Drama's central achievement."—Shakespeare Studies Annual

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